Catherine Breillat’s new film joins Irreversible, Twentynine Palms, and Secret
Things in the growing genre of French sex shockers. A credit in the beginning oddly
announces the use of a body double for the more intimate shots as an “extension of a fictional
character.” But the film is not concerned about character or plot. Instead, it is a polemic.

After meeting in a gay disco, the Girl (Amira Casar) challenges the Guy (Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi) to a series of encounters: she pays him to observe her in her most private
“unwatchable” moments. The logic behind the dare or the characters’ motivations is obtuse, as is
why a gay man would be amicable to or even aroused by her proposal, let alone represent the
misogynistic male in Breillat’s argument. Alone in an isolated house atop a cliff, their
four-evening rendezvous is made up of clinically graphic scenes which will undoubtedly provoke
and repulse.

The Guy’s dialogue, as translated from French, is as stiff as Siffredi himself: “You’re words are
inept approaches to me." Or - "The elasticity of a boy’s anus doesn’t lie.” Later, he compares her
genitalia to the skin of a frog, “but at least frogs have the decency to be green.” In their second
encounter, he brings a hoe into the bedroom, and not since Pia Zadora’s The Lonely Lady
has a gardening tool been so violated. A tampon cocktail and vaginal projectiles follow during
the next two nights. Anatomy of Hell is unlike Breillat’s powerful and complex Fat
Girl (2001), which was as subtle as it was hard-hitting. Instead, this film’s tone is
self-important and ponderous, as if to make it more thoughtful. Kent Turner